book review

Pleasure Activism offers up a multitude of tactics for which to embody pleasure, claim it as a central and essential liberatory practice, and a sustainable one for the long-term road trip of justice work.

If I could have willed a book into existence, that book would be Stray City — so I talked to Chelsey Johnson about her debut novel and what it’s like to render queer community so intimately for the public.

If you’re looking for easy answers that preserve your bubble, you won’t find them here. But that’s exactly why anyone who considers themselves an activist, an ally, or a member of the resistance writ large needs to read this book.

Life – fierce, painful, unyielding, complicated – bursts from every page of The Tiger Flu, which tells a story of love (and hate) between women in a futuristic world overrun by corporate technocracy and the effects of climate change.

A true map, it never says: this is the way to go, what to do. Instead, Piepzna-Samarasinha tells us what has worked for some people at some times, what could be done better, and also what went super wrong.

“I’ve had conversations with brands where they’ve been very explicit about who their customers weren’t. They weren’t plus size people. They weren’t queer people. They weren’t people of color. And those attitudes affect me as well as a black, queer woman.”

“At the end of the prologue, I had to put the book down, because I had broken out in ugly, heaving sobs on a Monday night in the dog days of summer, after a hot and heated and emotionally heavy July eclipse, drinking a glass of rose in my apartment in Harlem.”

Disney has retold their most famous Halloween story with a trio that’s comprised of two people of color, one of whom is queer; and the queer daughter of Max and Allison. It’s silly and spooky, and it’s an unabashed love story.

Queer Sex, a collection of interviews with trans and non-binary folks on sex, love and intimacy, is a map to erotic empowerment. In this excerpt, author Juno Roche explores her fears, hopes and erotic potential.

“Close your eyes and imagine for one moment a world where little black girls spend their entire childhoods seeing women like the ones they will become in just as many books, television shows, awards ceremonies, universities, political offices, magazines, advertisements and leadership positions as their white peers do. Really picture it, and then ask yourself: what would that future look like?”